When John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, Josiah “Tink” Thompson was a graduate student in philosophy at Yale University. Like millions of Americans, he was shocked by what seemed to be a senseless murder. Unlike most other Americans, he quickly began to investigate the matter himself.
Poring over Life magazine the following week, Mr. Thompson noticed a discrepancy: The magazine reported the shot that killed Kennedy had come from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository behind him, but the New York Times had written about a bullet hole in the president’s throat.
Anyone might have noticed the mismatch, Mr. Thompson said, but what he did next was unusual. “I think most people would not have the chutzpah to go to the F.B.I. with the New York Times in one hot little hand and Life magazine in the other,” he said.
Mr. Thompson’s visit to the bureau’s New Haven field office, where he said the agents essentially laughed him off, planted the seed of what became his life’s work: a painstaking forensic analysis of the final seconds of Kennedy’s life. He quickly became one of the pre-eminent “assassination buffs,” and though his life has taken twists and turns in the years since, the 86-year-old Bolinas resident and former private investigator has never stopped amassing evidence in the case.
His latest book, “Last Second in Dallas,” a thorough forensic investigation of that evidence, concludes the president was killed by a second shooter from the grassy knoll along the motorcade route. The book, published this year by the University Press of Kansas, revisits the the government’s findings and paints a detailed picture of the fatal final moment.
An ABC7 documentary, “JFK Unsolved: The Real Conspiracies,” which premiered this month, gives traction to what its producers call a “shocking” breakthrough by Mr. Thompson.
Mr. Thompson used updated ballistic evidence, acoustic science and a careful review of the famous Zapruder film to come to what he called a “quiet, simple” conclusion.
“This was a highly sophisticated, devastatingly effective assassination: two bullets to the head and one to the back,” he wrote in the book’s epilogue. “Its very audacity is its most compelling feature. Any speculation as to who did it and why must at least start with that fact.”
Though his theory contradicts the government’s findings, Mr. Thompson never engages in that kind of speculation. “Tink is not some conspiracy theorist out there on the fringes,” said Dan Noyes, a Marin-based investigative reporter who produced the documentary. “Here’s a guy who, for decades, has dealt with facts as a private investigator. He took that viewpoint on the assassination.”
Numerous dead-end conspiracy theories have exhausted the public over the years, Mr. Thompson contends. They have been counterproductive to scientific research on the basic questions he believes he has answered: Was the assassination a professional job? Was Lee Harvey Oswald the only shooter? Was Kennedy killed by a shot from the grassy knoll?
In “Last Second in Dallas,” Mr. Thompson tries to strip away the complicating factors that he says began to contaminate the evidence pool in the years that followed the findings of the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
First, the Zapruder film appears to show Kennedy’s head move forward suddenly as he’s shot, complicating the theory that the bullet came from the grassy knoll. Mr. Thompson examined points of light on the limousine and found that the head movement was an optical illusion caused by the movement of the camera, probably as Abraham Zapruder, the cameraman, flinched from the sound of gunfire.
Secondly, Mr. Thompson looks at updated metallurgical evidence showing that the method used to identify bullet fragments in Kennedy’s skull was unsound, reopening the idea that some of the bullets could have come from a weapon other than Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle.
Finally, there is the acoustic evidence. Other than the Zapruder film, perhaps the most notable piece of evidence recorded at the time resulted from a Dallas motorcycle police officer accidentally leaving his dictation machine microphone open during the shooting. After the House Select Committee used them as evidence, the gunshot-like noises on the Dictabelt recording were dismissed by a National Academy of Sciences panel as being static. Mr. Thompson pointed out that no acoustic scientists were on that panel, and he revisited the recording with acoustician James Barger, who wrote an appendix for the new book.
They found that the noises were gunshots that lined up with the film to show that the fatal shot likely came from the grassy knoll.
Consulting the right scientists and experts was a skill Mr. Thompson said he learned as a private investigator on criminal cases, a career he wrote about in his 1988 memoir, “Gumshoe: Reflections in a Private Eye.” His career as an investigator was inspired by his early J.F.K. research, which spawned a 1967 book, “Six Seconds in Dallas.” Several years after writing the book, he was on sabbatical from his assistant professor position at Haverford College when he met the well-known San Francisco detectives Hal Lipset and David Fechheimer.
He later worked for the defense on high-profile cases, including William and Emily Harris of the Symbionese Liberation Army and Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. In cases like these, Mr. Thompson worked to uncover details about both the crimes and the lives of the defendants that could exonerate them or mitigate their sentences. He also investigated the 1990 car bomb attack on environmental activist Judi Bari.
By around 2011, Mr. Thompson said, his detective days were over—his son, Everson, had become a prominent Marin private eye—and the evidence around the Kennedy assassination had changed. He was ready to return to the case.
Though he said the assassination has come to be “the abode of the kooks and wingnuts,” Mr. Thompson is modest about his own qualifications and the extent of his theories. “It’s simple: I don’t know who did it,” he said. “Anybody’s speculative opinion is about as good as anybody else’s.”
Though he is a seasoned investigator, Mr. Thompson said the strength of his research comes from simply being embedded in the case, practically from the beginning. John Grissim, a former Light columnist and Mr. Thompson’s collaborator and editor, called him “the Forrest Gump of assassination researchers”: always in the right place at the right time.
Mr. Noyes said he hopes his documentary on the assassination will drive home the importance of the truth. As for Mr. Thompson, Mr. Noyes said: “His motivations are really pure. He’s all about the facts.”
“JFK Unsolved: The Real Conspiracies” is available now at abc7news.com and will stream on Hulu starting Dec. 15. “Last Second in Dallas” is available to order from Point Reyes Books.